Mother is a real whiz with anything green; she has received many ribbons and awards for her flowers and arrangements. I once took her a plant that I was sure was dead and asked her to keep it for me. During a storm, the whole plant seemed to have been blown away! It was leveled! When I came back later, it had completely revived! I asked her what she did and she said she just watered it.
Dad was an amateur farmer. But he seemed to be really good at growing one thing: Tomatoes. He got it honestly… his dad was a champion tomato grower. They knew all the names and varieties and what grew best here or there. Personally, I hated them, at the time, but was interested in how they grew them. Wherever we lived, Dad made a point of finding a spot to plant his tomatoes.
Over the years, I noticed enough to realize a few things about tomatoes. First of all, LOCATION! Find a sunny spot, dig deep before you plant the starter plants, and most importantly: “If you want juicy tomatoes, you have to give them plenty of water.”
As we moved from one house to another, Dad would engineer different ways to provide water to the tomato plants. At one house, he just watered them every day. The water would seep down into the dry brown earth and often Dad would connect a sprinkler to the hose and let it “rain” on the plants for hours. He would dust them with Ortho and look for bugs, place sticks or fence wire around them to tie the vines with strips of old cloth just to keep the fruit off the ground. He really took good care of them.
We all pitched in. Mother would keep watch and make sure they lived and thrived. We would watch anxiously for the blooms, then the green tomatoes, counting them as they appeared. Finally, the days would come when we could go out and pick the reddest ones for the harvest. Often, we would get over-anxious and Dad would have to line the kitchen window with a row (or two… or three…) of green tomatoes with reddish areas on them to let them ripen in the sunshine that came through the window.
At another house, Dad planted the tomatoes and along the side of them he “planted” some four-inch concrete pipes vertically in the ground. I was interested and confused. Dad explained that by filling up the pipes with water, it could soak down to the roots of the tomatoes without running off down the hill. The water could go right where it needed to be.
Still another house provided the most interesting way to water the tomatoes. We lived on a slough (an inlet) off a large lake on the Tennessee River. Our property had a seawall with a sidewalk across the width of the yard. Dad planted the tomatoes right across the sidewalk from the lake. With a little growth, the tomatoes began to water themselves by having their roots right down at the water level. Since I didn’t eat them at the time, I can’t tell you for sure if they were the juiciest we ever had, but we did have plenty of them.
Now let’s see… how can I twist this into some big lesson for life? Well, it’s not hard to see quite a few parallels here, but I guess the main one is that tomatoes need a lot of water, and Dad was good at finding ways to do that. Otherwise, this one is a freebie.
